Better Security – memorable complex passwords

“Create a password with a minimum of 8 characters and including at least one upper case, one lower case and one numeric characters.”

Hateful isn’t it. What word to use? Is it complex enough? How on earth will I remember is without writing it down.

A worryingly large percentage of passwords expected to protect very sensitive data are usually made from wives/husbands names, or children or dogs or football teams or other easy to remember names. Unfortunately that makes them fairly simple to crack and therefore not very good security.

Well here is a complex one that is easy to remember:-

5l5cC42cmh

Easy to remember? Well yes, if you know how it is created.

Think of a song, poem or phrase that you are familiar with. In this example I have gone with the England Rugby anthem ‘Swing Low’

Swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home

Take the first characters of each word and you have SlscCftcmh. Then covert anything that could be a number (for, to) to numbers. Finally convert any character shapes that resembles a number to a number. In this case it is both the S’s which convert to 5’s.

So there you have it. A memorable complex password. Just remember not to sing it out loud when typing it in!